The Book Eaters

by Sunyi Dean

“I used to be a princess, you know.” Her reflection frowned doubtfully. Princesses in the books she’d read were pretty, delicate things: few of them were six-foot-tall murderesses with a penchant for shorn-off hair and leather jackets. Funny, that.

“Everyone is a monster to somebody.” Devon didn’t have to think for this answer; she’d prepared it long ago, in readiness. “But you are not, and never will be, a monster to me.” The worst and best lie she’d ever told him.

She stared, awestruck, at the writhing form with a red, crumpled face. The tiny fists and swollen cheeks. Nothing externally had changed. The galaxy still spun in vast unknowing indifference, and the uncaring world still flowed past beyond the confines of her bedroom. But here in that moment, the axes of Devon’s personal universe tilted and she was left teetering, off-balance to the core of her being.

Strangely, she had never missed having a mother till becoming one herself. With both arms around her daughter’s back Devon could, if she closed her eyes, imagine a young Amberly Blackwood from long ago, picking her up in the same way. But even then, the only face she could picture on such a figure was her own, albeit older. It was so hard to imagine a thing you had never seen.

They all loved apologizing, she thought bitterly. She’d had three apologies today, still counting. Didn’t stop anyone behaving abominably.

“Nice trinket. Family heirloom?” “Memento of my daughter.” Hester paused, mid-finger-comb. “… Oh. I’m sorry, I wouldn’t have picked it up if—” “It’s fine.” Devon opened the compass to display it. “Have a look if you want.” Everyone should see her daughter. “She’s lovely,” Hester said, subdued. “Of course. All little children are beautiful.” Devon snapped the compass shut and wound the chain around her palm. “Adults, not so much. We’ve done too many things in our lives to be beautiful.”

“I would have liked to have met happy-Devon, I think.” “Your own life isn’t exactly spun sugar, either.” “I’ve hardly talked about myself.” Hester set down the bottle, picked up the cups. “It’s what you don’t say.”

Memory was an anchor. It could ground you in a storm, keep you from drifting. But anchors could also weigh you down and keep you from sailing free.

“Why are you being kind to me?” “I’m not,” he said uncomfortably. “You’re a guest, I’m a host, and I have games. This is just basic courtesy.” Basic courtesy. Somewhere along the way, she’d stopped being deserving of that, or other people had stopped bothering to give it.

Hope was a thing you lost when simply trying to imagine better days became so exhausting, overwhelming, and depressing a task, that one opted for despair out of sheer weariness. Giving up brought peace.

“Jesus, Jarrow.” “What?” “Just…” She hit the Pause button. “You actually listen when I talk to you. And think about responses and say things that are pointful, and … it’s weird, that’s all.” “Jesus, Dev.” “What?” “You’ve a low bar for friendship, that’s all.” “If it’s such a low bar, then how come most people can’t meet it?” She sounded bitter, even to herself.

For here was the thing that no fairy tale would ever admit, but that she understood in that moment: love was not inherently good. Certainly, it could inspire goodness. She didn’t argue that. Poets would tell you that love was electricity in your veins that could light a room. That it was a river in your soul to lift you up and carry you away, or a fire inside the heart to keep you warm. Yet electricity could also fry, rivers could drown, and fires could burn; love could be destructive. Punishingly, fatally destructive. And the other thing, the real bloody clincher of it all, was that the good and the bad didn’t get served up equally. If love were a balance of electric lights and electric jolts, two sides of an equally weighted coin, then fair enough. She could deal. That wasn’t how it worked, though. Some love was just the bad, all the time: an endless parade of electrified bones and drowned lungs and hearts that burned to a cinder inside the cage of your chest. And so she looked down at her son and loved him with the kind of twisted, complex feeling that came from having never wanted him in the first place; she loved him with bitterness, and she loved him with resignation. She loved him though she knew no good could ever come from such a bond.

She lay for a minute or two and imagined her husband swinging from his expensive chandeliers by one of his own silk ties, only to become annoyed when the fantasy gave her no satisfaction. Hate was losing its emotional edge, becoming a common thing she lived with instead of a treasure she nursed.

Devon smiled. There had to be a moment, she thought, where you could pinpoint the tides of an ocean turning. A single specific flicker of time, recordable, measurable, where the waves stopped retreating and started advancing up the beach again. This, surely, was such a moment for her. For the first time in years, her heart seemed to float within her chest, free and light and calm. Fear had been an anchor, dragging her down, and the certainty of death had finally cut that chain. If all this politicking were a card game, the knights believed they had stacked the deck against her, to cover every eventuality. And if she could not win then she no longer had anything to lose. She would play with all she had because there was no other choice. In taking away her options, Ramsey had set her free.

“Listen,” Devon shouted, stepping in front of her. “Just let me finish, all right? Our childhood books always ended in marriage and children. Women are taught not to envision life beyond those bounds, and men are taught to enforce those bounds. We grow up in a cultivated darkness and don’t even realize we’re blind.” Hester stood on that stretch of green, hands balled into fists and gaze averted. But she’d stopped trying to walk away, at least for now. “I should have run sooner,” Devon said, voice cracking a little. “But I didn’t. Know what really stopped me? My lack of imagination, the same one that all ’eaters suffer from. I could not imagine a better or different future, Hes, and because I could not imagine it, I assumed it didn’t exist.” Her throat was lumping up. “I was wrong. Life can be different. You’re wrong, too. That’s why I think you should consider coming with me, to try something different.”

The story’s complexity had baffled Devon as a child, but she understood it well enough now. The truth was, Nycteris never really escaped. Oh, she got a prince and a castle and the cruel witch died at the end. But Nycteris could not ever leave the cave, because the cave was a place in her mind; it was the entire way she thought about reality. Princesses like that couldn’t be rescued. Devon’s last thought before falling asleep on the bus was to wonder if actually, she’d had it the wrong way around. Maybe everyone was living in a cave, and Nycteris was the only person smart enough to recognize it.

Someday, Devon thought, her promises would have worth. Someday, she would have enough strength to force the world into the way it needed to be. She would be good, and so would Cai. Somehow, in a place far from here.